Townsville and Airlie Beach

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We were so happy to get up and to leave Townsville today. It's just not our type of town that we have become accustomed to on this leg of our trip. Before heading out we ran into some of the people and one of the dive masters that were on our Yungala trip the day before and we shared our diving pics and videos and commiserated about how rough the ride out there was. Grabbed a kebab and a fro-yo and left around noon. The map that we had was worthless for getting us out of town, it took us a good hour to get to the highway and hightail it south. Our drive was more interesting this time. Two ginormous birds came outta nowhere and dove right in front of our car and scared the crap out of us, Erin also saw a huge dead 'super pig,' which they call the wild pigs here that are the result of farm pigs mating with wild boars. Right after we were surprised by the birds, we saw camels... what is going on here??? We had to make sure we were in Australia and not Africa!!

Airlie Beach was the next stop of the road trip, the gateway to the Whitsunday Islands. As we pulled into the little beach town we could feel ourselves relaxing and felt quite at home. It's much like the beach towns where we live in LA but with an Aussie backpacker vibe. Lots of people walking around barefoot, enjoying the weather. Our first order of business was getting ourselves booked onto a boat for a day cruise/dive around the Whitsunday Island for the next day. We found a good deal, got all set up and then headed out to look around. We checked out the lagoon which the town had built to use during 'stinger season,' as the finals rays of sun lingered in the sky. We grabbed a happy hour drink (again, perfect timing on our part) then spent some time meeting and chatting with our new roomies, hanging out on the porch enjoying the live band at the bar below. We actually fixed up our hair for the first time in about a week and headed down to the bar. We met a lot of new, fun people from Ireland, England and France and ended up going out to a place called Paddy Shenanigans up the street for some live music and dancing with them. Couldn't stay out too late though since our boat shuttle was coming bright and early the next day.

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